Merchant account initialization and maintenance for payment transaction processing accounts is usually performed manually for merchants that operate point of sale terminals where a customer can present a payment card, such as by running the magnetic stripe of the payment card through a magnetic stripe reader. For these accounts, the merchant calls a sales representative who obtains merchant account information and uses that merchant account information to provide pricing data to the merchant.
This prior art process for providing pricing information for merchant accounts suffers from many drawbacks. In particular, the merchant is given information after the sales account representative has consulted reference tables or other systems where it is not possible to see the effect of a change in value of a single variable on a merchant's costs. Likewise, the user that provides the pricing data to the merchant has access to proprietary pricing data, and can inadvertently or intentionally disclose that information to others.